


You were like home to me

by winterysomnium



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-07
Updated: 2012-11-07
Packaged: 2017-11-18 04:06:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/556717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterysomnium/pseuds/winterysomnium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With snow, Tim feels exposed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You were like home to me

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a lyric from the song "I Know You Care" by Ellie Goulding.

With snow, Tim feels exposed.

Exposed as if he’s cheating, cheating _badly_ and cheating without his face on, as if he’s minutes from getting caught, seconds from his cards dropping out, of his sleeves, out of his reach, moments from scattering like a fortune across his hands, across the field they built; as if he’s laid out, open for people, for dominoes and plain hollow eyes to follow, for them to catch on, _see_ that he’s paper bones and ink for skin, plastic instead of teeth, plastic for a heart, oil for blood. 

With snow, Tim might be static.

And with Kon behind him, behind his _jacket sweater skin_ covered back, with Kon’s TTK under his fingers, across his sides broken with hips and the dip of his insides – (it’s going to be lunch soon. It’s going to be noon and Ma’s kitchen will be the warmest place in the house, it’s going to be a crowd of four, a meet between wood and stone and human skin, a crowd that doesn’t intimidate Tim, not anymore.

If he doesn’t fit into Ma’s sweaters and if he doesn’t fit into Pa’s machines he fits into Kon’s presence, into the corners under the cage of his ribs, he fits where others were too small or too vast, where the gaps became cracks and wounds, sore and bloodless, he fits where others fell through.) 

And with the hollow song of snow, Kon hears his heart pick up.

Pick up maps of labyrinths and the melt of temperatures, the failure of structure, the transgression beyond _was_ and _is_ , pick up like there's a phone ringing too loudly in a quiet street, like there's an opening hush of a comlink, the sore scratch of _get here, quick_ syllables. 

Within this, Tim is more than just naked, more than just see-through, more than just _look at those smog stains under my shirt_ , look.

Within this (within _here_ ), Tim is almost fictional. 

Pinned inside a snow globe that jitters and shakes and recycles, identical nights with identical covers under different mouths; every lie, every badly covered up glitch in his life another stir, another quake, another rift that appears across his Dad’s forehead.

Gotham is cheating too.

Putting inches of ice white powder on blood stains, on stains of life on the second night of winter, on bruises of the pavement and the corpses, the missing will show in spring, will lie still until time can reach them again, until they’re more than paper and pleas and damp eyes of others, until their lost heartbeat finds its face.

Gotham lies through winter and ice and when summer comes, Tim is still under snow.

_He’s trapped there._

Not in his life, not in lies, perhaps in winter but completely in Gotham; there he’s real.

(And fake everywhere else.)

In Kansas, the snowstorms know.

In Kansas, they’re clean. Even if they’re spotted with dirt underneath, even if there are drops of oil and gas and smoke, even if there’s a dark, matted shine to them – 

there are always stars inside.

It’s true, it’s clean, it’s unpolluted; it could be alive. 

(And Kon is too.)

The crude and the sweet of him, the impulsive and the honest of him, they’re all clean. They’re all alive.

Tim tattoos another bone structure of his shoes onto the backyard’s ground, the farm a warmth behind them, the winter a presence around, Kon’s TTK loose strands of touch, of a reminder, of a nudge.

Tim thinks, doesn’t stop unless he’s sleep-drugged or drugged on intimacy, unless he’s so hurt he blackouts, and anything around him can be a thought, can be an idea he won’t let go; for a month, a year, his childhood. 

It’s a quiet snowstorm around them, a rhyme between the lines of snowflakes and the boundary they make, Tim spotted in freezing white and Kon underdressed and damp, Tim's ears burn under the soft wool. 

(And it’s when Kon _moves_ that it simmers. Sizzles, stretches from his head to his mouth.) 

“What it’s like? To fly through snow,” Tim asks, briefly glancing up, the sky a shade of its own, dying the blue of his eyes. 

Conner’s fingers slip into Tim’s pockets, his chest a sea against Tim’s shoulders and what Tim can’t see he _feels_ , through touch and scent and imagination, he can picture him.

He can picture him talk.

“Kinda… kinda like being underwater? Sometimes it can be pretty nice, ‘specially with snowfalls like today’s. It’s like – like if someone stopped a rainstorm in time. The snowflakes melt right away when I touch them so it’s almost just as wet, but there’s no speed to them. No impact, really. So that’s pretty cool. But most times it’s disorienting. Like when the sea’s cloudy after a storm? Something like that.”

His fingers curl inside Tim’s pockets, like he’s inside the sea now, the undercurrent breaking them apart.

(The undercurrents of Tim’s _mind_ , just as invisible, as unseen on his face as they’re on the surfaces of water, hidden on his body but Conner – Conner should already know.

He already recognizes every direction.)

“Why do you ask?” He tugs at Tim’s jacket, a message between their bodies, a slip of thought. 

(Conner still wants him close.) 

He’s still intimate, still soft, still in the naked hours of the day. 

(In _their_ naked hours, naked mornings when nights don’t want to undress, when nights pass out between them. 

Tim thinks he’s still there too.)

“No reason,” he answers, waiting. It isn’t a lie but it’s not true either; there’s never not a reason. (Never not a thought.) He eats through the feeling with more sounds. 

“I wish I could live here,” he says, steps further into the heart of the backyard and Kon follows, they both feel the beat.

“Who says you _can’t_? I’ll punch their teeth out,” Kon jokes, holds you like someone hurt you, like the ache has only woken up.

(They _did_ but Conner’s hurt too, he’s aching with years of bites and salt inside them and – where to hold him first?) 

Tim curls his hand around his TTK.

“It’s me,” Tim confesses, closes his eyes. It’s nice, to just be cold and warm and damp from the pull of the two feelings, from not understanding what’s better, what will win.

(From feeling so strange his insecurities can settle, can hide in it too.)

Tim knows. That’s what pollution does to you. That’s where Gotham is the most beautiful city he’s ever breathed in, the most beautiful town to see him cry. “I will die in Gotham,” he says, and there’s a projection hanging from his lashes; for a moment it erases Kansas from his sight.

Conner won’t say _You’re still young_. Tim hasn’t been young for years, hasn’t been young for thousands of fights, even when he’s a kid for adults, when he’s _kiddo_ for the people he wants to be grown up most for, when he’s barely through being a teen.

Instead, Conner frowns; Tim feels the pull on his skin. _I will die_ is something they didn’t learn to accept about each other, didn’t want to move on from. It reverberates, no matter where it sounds.

Their mouths start working again, slowly. “I… I don’t know what to say. When you talk like this,” Kon says, soggy with doubts, with _why_ ’s and answers, with things that could be wrong with him, places where he isn’t whole.

(If he weren’t a clone, would he know?) 

“I wouldn’t know either.” Tim sighs; the Gotham before his eyes ends.

Dick would know. Dick would talk him through it. His Dad would embrace his shoulder and let him collapse against his, let the TV fill the space where they should talk. Bruce would tell him to get some sleep.

But no one could change him.

“Isn’t it scary?” He turns to Conner’s shoulder, his words a puff of smoke over Conner’s wool covered heart, a miniature of a cloud. (It becomes part of the snow.) “When you have to accept that there are things you can never change about yourself?” He asks, doesn’t want an answer. It’s not a question and he’s not being fair, he’s not being the Tim he promised – promised _himself_ – to be. But it’s fair for Kon to know. “Gotham will always be my home.” 

He expects Conner to touch him, to solve things the way he can but the arm around the front of his jacket, the embrace on the side of his biceps – it rushes through him.

“Is that such a bad thing?” Kon brushes a peeking strand of Tim’s hair with his finger, curls it against Tim’s cheek and Tim sees him smile, sag against him as he wraps both arms around him, the sleeves of his sweater dark and soaked. 

Tim is startled by both. “I – I don’t know.” Having Gotham for home; is it something to want? 

“You could look at it from the other side. Take it as something that you can always rely on.” Kon stands straighter, lifts the air around them. The snow barely touches the bridges of their feet. “For example, I will always be a clone. There’s nothing anyone can do to change that. So I had to accept that and build my life around it. _On_ it. Try to see it less as something that looms _over_ you but more as something that’s solid underneath your feet? Like a rooftop but, you know, bigger? More stable? Man, for a guy that’s hardly on the ground you would assume you would see _all_ things like that.”

“Like I’m above them?” Tim glances at the line where Conner’s TTK doesn’t shield, where the tips of his shoes are drowning in icy stars, catches the edge of Kon’s forearm, tight around the shell of his chest, letting it expand and fall, expand and return. Tim reaches up to shape against the structure, his palm wet when he squeezes. 

“Well, yeah. In the nicest way possible, ‘course.” Kon smiles into the room Tim takes up and Tim doesn’t mind, Tim can’t bring himself to mourn the unseen smile.

(Conner knows what to say after all. He knows how to hold Tim, how to handle him, how to fight with him, how to accept.

And it’s so obvious now. Kon is someone Tim can always rely on.) 

“‘ _Course_ ,” Tim repeats, grimacing when Kon’s squeeze leaves a wet smear on his jacket, when drops drip down the buttons. “C’mon, let’s go inside. You’re all soaked.” 

“That’s because you threw snow under my sweater _and_ shirt before your scheduled Bat-brooding.” 

“I wasn’t – I don’t _have_ any scheduled Bat-brooding,” Tim huffs, jabbing his elbow into Kon’s side, sharp enough that he lets go, half-hearted enough not to hurt. 

“Ow! See if I ever share the last piece of pie with you again,” Kon grumbles, rubbing his side.

Tim rolls his eyes but holds out his hand, three steps ahead of Kon but waiting, a waft of smoke falling around the trees, the ashy scent a reminder of the house.

“C’mon, I’ll help you clean all the snow up once we’re inside,” Tim says, simply yet fond, with something that they can both decode, can both see Kon’s room and Tim taking Kon’s soaked clothes off, kiss his warm mouth with his cold one, catch his fingers against the knots in his hair, catch gasps against his teeth. 

And before they step through the door, before the doorstep pushes against their soles, Tim stops and holds Kon’s hand more, as much as he can. Without trying to look up, he talks to the porch of the house, to the freezing wood. 

“And Conner?” He says, the last snowflakes melting on his nose, the tip of it as red as his mouth. 

“Thank you.”


End file.
